“Hi my name’s Duchess Chickentush”…”Hi Duchess”…”And I’m a shoeaholic.”  There really isn’t a twelve step program for people with my addiction.  Apparently the popular consensus is that we are a harmless group, but that is only the opinion of people who shop at Shoe Carnival and Payless.  For those of us who have enjoyed the pleasure of slipping into a pair of Cole Hahn or placing or precious feet into Manolo’s we know what dangers lurk in the world of shoe addiction.  When a simple pair of flats can cost $250 or more and you justify a pair of $500 heels by telling yourself that you will wear them ten times longer than you would a pair of $50 heels you have a sickness.  I recognized my illness when my mother in law passed away.  My father in law was stunned to learn that she had over seventy pairs of shoes.  That got me wondering just how many pairs of shoes I had.  So I began counting.  Not counting flip-flops and slippers…just counting the shoes I consider to be “good” shoes, I had over two hundred pairs.  I began to think I should get a grip on myself.

I looked in my closet to see what I could get rid of.  The black flats are necessary for the black crop pants that are too casual for heels.  Then you need a black kitten heel when the situation requires more than a flat, but not really a high heel.  My classic pumps are for formal occasions.  This same holds true for brown, and red, and taupe, silver, blue, and beige but not gold (I don’t like gold shoes).  I have flats in green, turquoise, pink, purple, and various patterns from florals to plaids and everything in between.  They all match some outfit or the other and in addition can be worn with solids just to jazz things up.  I have boots in black and brown.  High and low heels in both colors so they can be exchanged to suit the occasion.  In addition I have brown and red cowboy boots and really cute little short tan spiky boots that have the cutest little spike heels and just look like sex.  I have some really expensive sandals that we purchased on vacation in Key West that remind me every time I wear them of just how spoiled I truly am.  I have some clogs that have San Francisco hand-painted on them, and a pair of lace-ups that are way too fancy to be tennis shoes but are high top icons that have a  hand-painted Gauguin scene on the side and another pair that have Van Gogh.  I have a pair of sandals by the same company that we found in the shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas but I don’t even know what we paid for those (that really scares me) and they have a street scene painted on them.  I have flip-flops of every color imaginable.  I have two or three different styles in some colors. Last year I went nuts for Crocs.  I bought every Croc I saw that looked like it had a chance of ever being worn. I bought slip-ons, and mary janes, and clogs, all in as many colors as I could justify.  I even bought a pair in the colors of my beloved Indianapolis Colts.   I have tennis shoes in white (of course) canvas and leather, orange, blue, green, grey, pink, solid pink, floral, and silk paisley.  If you looked in my closet you would think you had entered a Merrell kiosk.  The right side of the wall is lined with Merrell boxes.  I have them in sandals and flats and tennis shoes.  Merrell’s are perhaps the most comfortable shoes on the planet.  I have never had to break in a pair of Merrell’s.  With all of the shoes that I have I would say eighty percent of the time I’m in Merrell’s.  I love house shoes.  The sillier the better.  My nephew got me a great big hunking pair of bright red fake Converse high top slippers so goofy that you can’t tell right from left, and they are the most comfortable things (next to Merrell’s) on the planet.

With all of this, the first thing I do when I enter any department store is check out the shoe department.  I have to see what is new.  I love the smell of the leather.  I love the feel of the supple hide against my foot.  I like going to the little mirror on the floor and turning my foot first one way and then the other to see how the shoe looks on my foot.  I love imagining what I will wear with this particular shoe when it is mine.  I envision its life at home with me.  I love it already!  Then I go into action.  I bargain with myself.  I don’t really need this shoe.  But wait, if I get it I’ll cut out Starbucks Soy Caramel Macchiatos for a month and that will pay for them…plus I’ll lose some weight.  So by buying these shoes I’m actually doing myself a favor, and I’ll be healthier too.  Yup, that is how I’ll sell it when I get home.  Or else, I bring the shoes in when no one is home and I put them in the closet.  Then I wait for three or four days to wear them.  Then if Mr. Chickentush says anything I say “These old things?  They’ve been in the closet for a while.”  (I know step one…admit you have a problem).  The thing is I actually have some shoes in my closet that have never been worn.  One year for Valentine’s Day, my hubby (the enabler) gave me twenty-four hours of shoe buying.  I went nuts.  I bought shoes in the tri-city area.  I bought shoes online.  I shopped ’til I dropped.  I bought something like fifteen or sixteen pairs of shoes.  Man, it was a great day!!  Mr. Chickentush knows how to treat a woman.  Anyway,  I still have shoes from that shopping spree that I thought were cute, but I haven’t worn.  I will, but I haven’t.

Now that I have spilled my guts and admitted that I am without a doubt one step away from Imelda Marcos here’s the crazy thing…what with adding shoes to my closet and taking none away…admitting that I have a true addiction problem with regard to footwear.  I still have to admit to one more thing before I can begin the healing process…this is hard….I haven’t been able to actually say this out loud to any one else before…here I go…(drum roll please)  I PREFER BEING BAREFOOT!!  Please never tell Mr. Chickentush!  I have to have cute shoes when we go out.  My shoe size is the only size that has been the same since sixth grade. 

 

 

My blog has become a haven for smut postings.  Every day I spend most of my time editing comments from smut sites that want to post on my blog.  Who knew?  I thought my little blog would be safe.  We’d talk over the effects of menopause, aging in general, rag on our kids, complain about our parents, you know pretty much chat like I would if we were having coffee at my house.  Turns out, the difference is if we were at my house these filthy creeps wouldn’t be in the kitchen screaming obscenities at us while we were having our Kenyan Blend.

How did they find me?  I don’t hang out on street corners and hang my tas out asking them to drop by for a quickie.  I don’t go to cheap motels and ask them to knock on the door of the room with the red light in the window.  Hell, I am someone’s grandmother.  I am writing about good American values here, (and the occasional broken cootch)!  What gives them the right to peddle smut at my front door?  I was asked to respond to a comment on my sweet little blog about wrapping Christmas presents.  The comment was about anal sex videos and where to go to order them.  WTF???  I don’t even slightly get the parallel.  I asked my niece who designed my blog site what I could do about these losers, and she said basically nothing.  We have to spam them after each entry and spam the entry as well.  Now that they have found the site, even if we were to block the entry they could use a backdoor (go ahead and laugh…I get it….for those of you who don’t, think about what the videos were about) and leave comments anyway.  Great!!

I love it when people leave comments.  It’s the only way I can tell when people read my blog.   I don’t believe when someone leaves a comment that only refers to “giant c***s” that they have really read my blog.  I don’t usually reference such things.  It’s not really my style.  I guess I have now, and perhaps that means I will have to reconsider my blog genre.  Anyway, it is really annoying.  I just don’t see why smut has to color everything in our world.  You can’t ride a taxi, bus, or train without seeing  graffiti on the side of the road and the interior of the vehicles.  When we were in Rome there was a wall near our hotel where someone had written “f*** Bush”.  I happened to agree, but I didn’t want to see it written in black spray paint on the side of a wall in Rome.  It’s almost like people can’t stand to see blank, clean, spaces.  Do you remember being a kid and having to walk  on any snow that hadn’t already been walked on?  Pristine snow just called to me.  I had to leave my footprints.  I loved it.  However; I didn’t write obscenities in the snow.  Partly because it would have been unseemly, and partly because my parents would have beaten the holy hell out of me. 

That’s the other thing.  I don’t have the option of responding back to these idiots who leave their crude comments.  I would like to tell them some of the basic life rules my parents drilled into me.  “Fool names and fools faces are always seen in public places”  Okay, maybe not that one.  “Pretty is as pretty does”, doesn’t really work either.  How about…”crayons are for paper”.  I think I’m getting closer.  “If you don’t settle down and act like you got some smarts I’m about to put the hammer down!”  Yup, that’d do it.  It always worked for me.  I don’t know why I worried about him putting the hammer down.  He never picked the hammer up!  Still, it kept me out of trouble and I wouldn’t have tagged anything to save my soul.   I would love to tell these people who are probably earning God knows how much to spend time at the computer looking for innocent little blogs and smut them up that they would be better off using their resources for good rather than evil.  But alas, they are harder to find than I am.  I can email back to the address that they leave the comments from (and I have) but I get…notice: failure to deliver…each and every time!  Damn these dark forces!!

I can’t win.  I will continue to spam comments.  I will go into my email account several times daily and approve those people who count, and spam the idiots who think this site is some kind of trash can for porn.  I can’t believe that they think I would do anything else.  Maybe on occasion they find some fool who doesn’t look and blindly allows all comments on their site.  Yeah, I’m not that dumb.  I’ve raised kids…I know how fools behave.  I will check and check and check.  In addition to all my other titles I am now a watchdog.  Grrrrrrrrrrr!  Watch out…I bite!! 

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday.  It was a great day.  I slept in, and then had a nap.  My hubby took the whole family out to eat at one of my favorite restaurants and then we went home for a Van Gogh A Starry Night cake (chocolate of course)!  What could be better?  Well since you asked…My grandson, Captain Precious, showed up in his bear hat and immediately started yelling for his Emmy.  We ate a little and colored a lot.  When it was time to go home, nothing would do but that Emmy go with him.  So, of course, I did.  We came home and checked out the chocolate cake and prepped ourselves for the eating before Bop and Daddy came home.  Once they arrived, it was very important that we eat cake first…after we blew out candles two or three times. (I think he’s perfecting his technique in preparation of his upcoming birthday.)  So we did.  We ate cake, and we ate cake.  Then we decided to open presents (which is to say my grandson decided we needed to open presents) .  Anyone who is considering opening presents owes themselves an almost two year old.  They open presents with a zeal that would add enthusiasm to a gift of toothpaste.  Luckily, I didn’t get toothpaste. 

Now, let me mention…if I haven’t in a previous blog…my grandson has a fascination that borders on an obsession with balls.  He loves baseballs, golf balls, footballs, soccer balls,  tennis balls, any ball of any kind in fact any round object of any kind gets the wide eyed, awe struck “ball” from the child that only a twenty-month old child can produce.  With each package a hopeful “ball?” was heard, and each time it was something he thought was lame.  A video, a sweater, shoes all held no appeal for this child.  The only redemption was one package that was wrapped in polka dot paper. “Balls!” he shouted joyfully.  At least he knew that one had balls on it if not in it.  More disappointment.  The next one up was black with pink and purple paper, nothing round to be seen but the little monkey is yelling “football, football” like his life depends on it.  The package is only six inches by six inches so I really don’t believe a football is in there; however this package is from my son, non-vag daughter, and the monkey man so I’m beginning to think there is a football in this gift bag.  I open it up and the little creep starts bouncing in his chair, “football, football,!!”  I open the little box inside, and he rips the charm bracelet from my hand and proudly shows me the football charm dangling from it.  A large grin covers his face and he very self satisfactorily says, “football.”  I have to agree.  It is indeed a football.  It is then that I realize that the whole gift unwrapping for him was just trying to get to the football that he knew was in there somewhere.  The rest was just superfluous. 

My hubby always saves what is in his opinion the best gift for last.  Well last night he handed me a huge gift bag.  Just for the record, this is how my husband wraps gifts…he uses gift bags and tissue paper…done and done.  As he was handing it to me he said “I think this is my favorite gift I have ever given you.”  Big words.  My husband is quite possibly the best gift giver in the world.  Over the years I have been given a lot of jewelry (all spectacular), several trips (equally spectacular), a horse (yes the hay eating kind), and various other uber surprises so when he says this might be his favorite I just can’t imagine what it could be.  The first thing I pull out is a  DVD of The Duchess.  Then comes a birthday Barbie.  Next out is a Barbie tiara and Barbie drop earrings…but I see a rolled up piece of paper in there and in our family that means that something was so huge you couldn’t put it in a bag and it had to be written on paper and placed in a bag.  I pull out the paper and read the words I have waited for forever …YOU ARE A DUCHESS…Oh hell yes!!   I am a duchess!  My papers will be arriving next week.  My husband has purchased a title for me.  To those of you who know me well, and you know who you are, I am still the same humble person I have always been.  The rest of you can refer to me as “your grace”.  That is the proper way to refer to a duchess.  I called my two out of town kids (since they weren’t there) to tell them there mother was a duchess and the oldest greedy little mooch immediately asks what that makes him.  Absolutely nothing.  He asked if he was at least the son of a Dutch.  Alas, no.  I had to inform him that my gain in no way impacted him…”it’s not about you this time.”   The youngest would have also inquired about the impact on her situation, but I told her the story about her brother, so she refrained.

I don’t know what my official title is.  I won’t know until I get my papers, and apparently a video that tells me how to use my title properly.  I bet its a small area.  You could probably carpet it…with a remnant…and it would cost less than $10 bucks.  It doesn’t matter, I’ll probably never visit anyway. Other than to collect taxes.  Then again, it might not be worth the flight for $1.98  We’ll have to wait and see.  Until then I’ll just Duchess from afar.  Pardon me while I push my nose a little further out of joint…(It’s good to be me!)

 

 

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